Bantam Live

We've always admired what Salesforce.com has done in paving the way for the adoption of on-demand, software-as-a-service architecture across the business landscape. It seems they've evidently returned admiration for us with their pre-announcement of their forthcoming product called Chatter that targets the enterprise. To be sure, industry competitors borrow from each other and it's no secret that the "Bantam Live is Facebook for business teams" moniker has been frequently mentioned in trade media and in tweets, and we tip our hat to Mr. Zuckerberg. Indeed, Facebook gave us the idea, now implemented in Bantam Live, that if people wanted to know what was going on with their friends, then maybe workers would want to know what's going on with their coworkers' activities, ideas, productivity workflows, and data - all visible and interactive in a real-time stream.

Our view is that Salesforce is following our lead in the fusion of people/apps/content that we've pioneered with Bantam Live. It's quite validating. A brief history...

> July 10th, 2009: at the first TechCrunch Real-time Conference event, Salesforce.com and Bantam Live give back-to-back presentations from the stage of the Fox Theatre in Redwood City. Salesforce gave a corporate presentation and Bantam Live launched the public-beta version of its unique online product that fuses people, content, and application data with a real-time stream and integrates to social networks like Twitter. We even showed a social CRM demo with a lead-generation workflow, importing contact and content from Twitter. TechCrunch entitled its post of Bantam Live "The Ultimate Social, Real-time CRM" and ReadWriteWeb had said, "Bantam Live is part enterprise Twitter, part CRM, and part Facebook for business teams."

> July 11th - August, 2009: A swarm of Salesforce product managers and developers register with and use Bantam Live.

> November 20, 2009: at the second TechCrunch Real-time Conference, Salesforce will promote its pre-announcement this week of Chatter. Salesforce's description of Chatter is a product remarkably similar to what Bantam Live beta-launched back on July 10th, which fuses people, apps, content, and application data.

Bantam Live - uniquely in this industry - has blended the multiple apps of microblogging, online collaboration, social CRM, project management, document sharing, social network integration, etc., all of which are parsed and assembled into data objects and fully integrated in the real-time stream. If you want to get a glimpse of what Salesforce's Chatter might one day do for the enterprise, sign on today to see who they're following in the SMB space. We launch commercially with paid-subscription plans in January with new modules, features, and highly attractive pricing.

In the SMB space, we look forward to competing with Salesforce in 2010. Stay tuned.